Mycelium

Even when life takes us far apart, we bring families back together —like mycelium beneath the soil. Our App connects families and is tailored for the well-being of their elderly members.

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Inspiration

My name is Zackary. After my grandpa passed away, my grandma needed more frequent care and attention. My mom often takes her to medical appointments, and I help organize her daily medications and supplements. As a family, we constantly worry—will she forget to take her meds, or accidentally take the wrong ones at the wrong time? Is she safe around the kitchen or on the street? We wanted to make a way for her to check in and confirm she was okay. When we couldn’t find a good app to help her stay connected and supported, we decided to build one that was simple, caring, and made just for her needs. The name Mycelium was inspired by the natural intelligence of mycelium networks, which support and connect entire ecosystems. In the same way, we hope our app can support and connect families, helping them thrive together.

What it does

Mycelium helps families care for their elderly loved ones by providing daily check-in questions, gentle reminders with photos or videos, and wellness tracking. There are two roles in the app: elderly and family member users. Elderly users can easily check in (and show that they are safe), view their tasks, and play brain games, while family members can monitor their well-being through analytics dashboards, set up custom reminders and check-ins, and communicate directly through the app.

How we built it

We started by researching similar apps on the App Store, but none met the needs of our family, so we decided to build one ourselves. We brainstormed key features, designed a simple and intuitive UI, and used Bolt to implement it. We then spent time fixing errors and building new features, using Bolt often. Finally, we brought our idea to life.

Challenges we ran into

AI hallucinations forced us to rethink our prompting strategy. We learned to make prompts as clear and specific as possible.

As the project grew, the context window became unwieldy, leading to excessive token usage. Following Bolt’s advice, we tried splitting the project into two smaller ones—but syncing them was difficult. We eventually merged them back and had to debug quite a bit.!

Deployment wasn’t smooth. We registered our domain with Ionos and deployed on Netlify, but DNS conflicts led to an ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR—our site became unavailable just when we thought it was live.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was our first time using AI Vibe Coding, and we, as a small two-person team, built something real in a short timeframe. When we saw how this app could directly improve the well-being of seniors and the relationships between families, we felt deeply proud.

What we learned

The three most important lessons we learned are to design first (Redesigning mid-development is costly), be crystal clear with AI prompts, and trust AI, but always understand what the code is doing.

What's next for Mycelium

Right now AppStore Beta testing is available at: https://testflight.apple.com/join/T9dCdpa9 We’re working to make Mycelium available on the App Store and Google Play, so more families can care for their loved ones with ease and connection.

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